


holes in a body full of stars

by Cinnamonbookworm



Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Angst, Character Study, F/M, adrien also likes to be moody and dramatic but that's okay because we love him anyways, adrien likes to hang out on rooftops, child adrien liked constellations a lot, chloe canonically throws clothes out her window, grown up adrien likes constellations a lot, i have no knowledge about the night sky of paris, i try and fail at puns, just like adrien, missing mom agreste
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-07
Updated: 2016-02-07
Packaged: 2018-05-18 18:49:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5939395
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinnamonbookworm/pseuds/Cinnamonbookworm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>There are a lot of fairytales Adrien knows, but too little of them involve the magic of a rooftop and the way it feels to kiss someone and find yourself under a snow globe of stars.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Or: 5 Times Adrien Spends the Night On His Roof</p>
            </blockquote>





	holes in a body full of stars

1

Adrien is five years old and his house is a castle for exploring and his mother is the only princess he’s ever needed. He’s obsessed with fairytales and fantasy and his father has decided that the three of them watching Robin Hood together on the large plush grey couch in the living room is to blame.

(The wooden sword he bought him soon thereafter, though, seems to indicate he’s very willing to go along with Adrien’s fantasies).

It’s no wonder he feels like a knight when the Agreste Mansion itself could almost be called a castle. It’s happier than the castle in Robin Hood is, though. There’s no Sheriff here to ruin everything. No need for Merry Men. No need for anyone else but his mother and his father and the joy that echoes off the walls and fills the entire house with the sound of summer.

It doesn’t hurt that Chloe thoroughly enjoys playing princess with him. She won’t play a lot of things but she’ll gladly spin around in sparkly dresses and run up and down the hallways with him, looking for wizards in any of the highest towers of the house or fairies hiding in the gardens.

The gardener is an elf and the chef is an enchanter and Adrien’s white horse out in the stables is a pegasus just waiting to fly them all away.

Except there’s no need to fly away, because this castle is protected by Sir Adrien the Lionhearted and Lady Chloe the Righteous and ruled by Queen Maman and King Papa and sometimes King Papa pretends to be a rival knight and fights him with wooden swords while Lady Chloe sits on Queen Maman’s lap and they all laugh and scream and play together.

The days are colored golden and the nights are full of stories.

Because his mother takes him up to the rooftop of the mansion with blankets and some sleeping bags when the heat inside feels like dragon’s breath. She sits with him and points out that sometimes stars make pictures and then she tells him all of the stories.

There are so many heroes, just like him. Hercules. Perseus. Orion.

And so many monsters for him to fight. Dragons and serpents and lions and bears.

He wants to be them all. He wants to be the hero of every story and make everyone proud, and he even listens to the love stories even though he’s not really a fan of them. Girls are gross on principle. Even Chloe. And love stories are also gross and terrible, but they’re in every story, and he likes the way his mother looks at his father when she tells them. So he can be all the heroes, but, at the end of the story, he lets his parents be the heroes because he loves watching them smile together.

He makes his own constellations those nights, looking up and drawing pictures in the sky with more vigor and imagination than anyone other than a child could. Years later, those are the only ones he’ll remember, because his mother makes a story for each one of the ones he says he sees, and crafts each one with such care he feels like he’s been handed something worth more than anything they own in their house.

She weaves tapestries with words that he’ll keep in his memory long after he’s forgotten what she smells like or the exact shape of her smile.

Because in each of these stories he’s the hero and she is immensely proud of him. And he’d like to think she’d still be proud of him now. 

But then, in that moment, the three of them are cuddled close together on sleeping bags on the roof in the heat of the midsummer nights and sometimes he falls asleep and curls into the stomachs of either of his parents and feels completely utterly safe and happy.

 

2

They come back to the Paris mansion the summer that he’s fifteen.

It’s been years since they’ve lived here. Or, more accurately, a lifetime ago. The white marble halls that once were the happiest place on earth for him are now empty and cold. No children play in the hallways. No unicorns sit in the stables. Even the staff has been switched out. All his mothers things were packed away long ago (Adrien still knows where they sit, though, in that dark corner of the attic that he’d ran to as soon as his father had left him alone).

There’s only one place that hasn’t really been ruined yet.

And it’s not his bedroom, no, not there. He refuses to sleep there the first night back. It doesn’t feel right to sit in a room full of castles and dragons and so much hope and joy and remember that he can’t be a hero now, or anything he wants to be. He doesn’t want to remember how he’d joined fencing because he’d wanted to be a knight and now he dreads going.

He doesn’t want to think about how somewhere along the line everything beautiful got ruined and turned cold and icy, even himself, and how it’s all because mom left and then  _ they left _ and this house turned into a shrine for a long-dead family.

There’s one place that’s been left untarnished. And that’s the roof.

Someone took the gate down at some point, so now there’s nothing to stop him if he trips and goes tumbling over the edge. But he won’t. He knows that. Years of fencing and precarious modeling jobs have left him with very good reflexes.

The lights of Paris look different. There are new hotels, new restaurants, so many things that prove things aren’t the same as they were when he was five years old and the entire world was a story out of a storybook. 

But the night sky… Well, some things never change.

All the constellations are still there, even the ones he’d made up. Every single story is preserved in the sky, like a library that you can only access if you sit just right here.

And he’s sitting here, for the first time in so long, just basking in the memories that float over to him from the sky above and wondering if maybe them coming back here means things can be good again. Mom can’t come back, he knows that, but things were happy here once before, they might be able to be happy again.

He doesn’t even realize it when he falls asleep.

It’s a soft shaking on his shoulder that wakes him up, and he looks up to see Nathalie Sancoeur kneeling next to him, looking slightly worried. Her maroon pumps are probably getting scratched up in the gravelly texture of the roof, but she doesn’t really seem to care.

He’s not sure what they really mean to each other.

She’s not really family, but she’s closer to him than his father is, at least. And every now and then they have moments like this, where she’ll look at him with something that almost might be fondness.

Or pity.

“You should be sleeping in your room, Adrien.” she chastises in a whisper, but he doubts she really means it.

She was there to see his refusal to disrupt his childhood bedroom. Gabriel Agreste, on the other hand, was not.

All of his things from the house in Caen sit in one of the seven guest rooms, except for a few blankets and a pillow, which he’d brought up here.

“I wanted to see the stars.”

“I can arrange for you to have a guest room with a larger window…”

He knows she’s trying, in her own way. But she doesn’t really get it. So he pats his hand on the blanket next to him and motions for her to sit.

“My mom used to sit with us up here when I was younger and tell me stories about the constellations.”

“Oh-” Nathalie stutters a bit, like she always does on the rare occasion that the missing Mrs. Agreste is brought up by either Adrien or his father. He knows she’s not quite sure how to navigate this particular situation. He knows that times before her name being mentioned has only been a sign of him being about to fall apart.

But tonight it’s different. So, when she sits, he points up at the stars and begins to tell her their names and their stories.

He’s scared of what the move here means, scared of going to a school with other students, scared of the reminders that fill the mansion that him and his father and their whole family has been broken and no one’s really fixing it.

But he knows Nathalie’s scared too, mostly for him, and he can’t bear to watch her feel that way. He wants to help her. He still wants to save people. Just like he did when he was younger. Maybe saving her from worrying about him is the first step.

So he tells her the stories.

And, when he wakes up in the morning to the sunrise, there’s a few new blankets around him and the chef is making those danishes that he used to eat when he was younger, and he suspects he must’ve let it slip to Nathalie in their conversation about stars and his childhood.

He moves a trunk up to the roof full of blankets and a sleeping bag and a radio. She doesn’t tell his father. He doesn’t either.

 

3

Chat Noir’s first rooftop leap is from the roof of the Agreste Mansion.

Chat Noir’s first detransformation also happens there.

Adrien starts keeping cheese in the trunk on the roof for Plagg. He also begins to decorate the spare room he’s been sleeping in on slightly colder nights when his father is home. Things aren’t good, but they’re looking up a bit. And now he has a friend.

Plagg is fascinated by the constellations and their stories. He also does not understand how Adrien is seeing thing in stars, when stars clearly and always only make one shape.

“Cheese.”

Adrien laughs, popping another strawberry into his mouth and lying back on the sleeping bag below him. “No, Plagg, that one’s Andromeda.”

“It’s clearly string cheese, kid.”

“She’s part of a  _ famous _ love story.”

Plagg rolls his eyes, and Adrien smiles because he knows they’re both just trying to get a rise out of each other. “There you go again with your love stories, kid. You know, the only real love you need in life is the love between you and cheese.”

“Is that why you thought Scorpius was Tikki, then?”

His kwami glares at him through a mouthful of Camembert and points a tiny grey finger at him accusingly. “I should have never told you about her.”

“I’m glad you did.”

“It’s made you get all sentimental.”

He was sentimental long before he met Ladybug and they both know that, since Adrien’s currently trying to tell him all the stories his mother made up when he was a child about the constellations above them, but Plagg’s got to keep up a little bit of a front; one of them has to have a straight head in battle.

Adrien motions to a section of stars he’d dubbed as “Candy Dragon” when he was five.

“What do you think that one is?”

“Cheddar.”

“It doesn’t- How could you possibly- It’s a Candy Dragon, Plagg.”

“Uh huh. Sure it is. I see cheddar.”

Adrien throws a cheese roll at his head. One that decisively  _ isn’t _ made of cheddar.

“School’s going to start soon, you know.”

“And?”

“We’re not going to be able to do this anymore.”

“You will. Chat Noir finds a way to save the day no matter the alter ego.”

“No, I mean  _ this. _ Sitting on the roof. Talking.”

“We still have a few more weeks, kid.”

For the first time that summer, Adrien’s eyes drift to a different series of glowing lights; those of the city. The city he’s now sworn to protect. The city full of people who might go to his school. Who he might meet. Who he might be friends with.

All he’s ever had before was Chloe. And now Plagg. He’s not quite sure how to make friends without having something else intervene.

“What’s your favorite constellation, Plagg?”

“The Jarlsberg one, for sure.”

“I’m serious.”

“Me too. Love stories are overrated. But cheese… cheese will never leave you.”

 

4

Nino loves the roof. Possibly more than Adrien does.

His excitement when Adrien first talks about his rooftop hideaway one day when they’re talking between classes. Nino’s never really been a large fan of the Agreste Mansion, ever since the whole Bubbler thing, but his face lights up when Adrien brings up how you can see the whole skyline of Paris from just one spot.

And the stars. So many stars.

After school, he comes over and they climb up to the roof, through the attic full of ghosts of his mother, and they dangle their feet off the rooftop and watch Nino’s bubbles soar into the sky.

“Isn’t that Chloe’s house over there?” Nino asks, directing his bubbles in the direction he’s indicating.

“Yeah.”

Adrien’s lying on his back looking at the sky. He always seems to be doing that when he comes up here. He’s watching clouds instead of stars, but there’s the same effect. They’re calming and intriguing and they remind him of that feeling his mother always used to give him. The feeling that anything was possible and anything could be anything.

Right now all the clouds look like hearts.

“She’s chucking shoes out her window.”

“She does that sometimes.”

It’s true. Occasionally Chloe throws clothes out her window. Someone placed a donations bin right where they usually land so technically it’s all going to a good cause. Technically. It’s just another piece of the landscape, though. He’s so used to it - and her, really - by now that it doesn’t quite fascinate him the way it’s fascinating Nino.

“Was she always like this? All…”

Nino doesn’t actually say the adjective he’s describing, but Adrien gets what she means. “I guess? I don’t know. We grew up kind of the same way.”

“Rich and isolated?”

Adrien laughs but that’s not what he really means. He means life used to be everything and mean everything and then the both of them got broken too young and they’ve dealt with it differently.

And he knows he left her behind.

He knows neither of them were that good at making friends and then he left her behind and they lost each other and there’s a bond that children have that never really goes away. So yes, they grew up rich and isolated. They’ve both dealt with it differently.

Adrien lives on his rooftop and tries to dissolve into stardust.

Chloe throws clothes out of her window if they’ve been worn on a bad day.

With the increasing akuma attacks, both have been happening a lot more lately.

“She stopped throwing them.” Nino points out.

Adrien takes the green bubbles Nino had bought him at a corner store on the way here and blows his own bubble into the sky.

“She stopped throwing them because Ladybug showed up.” Nino says a little louder.

Adrien sits up so fast he nearly falls off the roof. Nino laughs and catches him. “Dude, one day your obsession with her is actually going to kill you.”

“Ladybug’s there?”

His best friend reaches an arm over to point at Chloe’s rooftop, where Ladybug’s fighting off an akuma whose M.O. seems to be university acceptance letters. She didn’t call him for this one, and it looks like she can handle it, but Adrien’s still feeling a little let down.

He would’ve liked to fight by her side.

“Lucky for you, Chat Noir seems mysteriously absent. Make your move, dude.”

Nino’s teasing him and it’s working because he always feels a bit more brash when he’s sitting on the rooftop with his feet dangling over the edge. He would definitely make his move. But… not like this.

Chat Noir’s the one with all the courage. Adrien just kind of prefers to watch and blow bubbles.

Her lucky charm is a fishing rod. She blinds the akuma by angling the sunlight off of one of Chloe’s diamond pumps long enough to cleanse it and save the poor person.

It’s only after that that she looks over, the setting sun behind her like angel’s wings, and Adrien turns bright red.

He can’t look away.

Nino laughs. It’s not funny. It’s really not funny. Except then Ladybug somehow decides to swing her yoyo across the street and it snags on this corner that still has pieces of where the fence used to be and then she’s on the rooftop with them and Adrien short-circuits.

Ladybug. Is. On. His. Rooftop.

“Are you guys okay?” she asks, and she sounds kind of breathless but he supposes it’s from fighting the akuma by herself.

“Yeah! Didn’t even touch us. Thanks for taking care of that, Ladybug!” Nino is apparently not having the same problem.

Adrien is still having difficulty finding words.

“And you?” she asks, her eyes drifting over to him.

He tries to contain the redness of his face. This is his turf. He should be able to form coherent sentences on it. It’s just hard because he’s filtering out all the bad puns and flirtatious remarks so she won’t realize Chat Noir was just a rooftop over and didn’t help her with that battle. He nods his head instead.

“Stay safe!” she calls out as she swings away.

“I’m  _ paw _ some.”  He finally lets out when she’s out of range, like a breath he’d been holding.

Nino rolls his eyes a little. “Shame Chat Noir didn’t show up,” he says, shooting Adrien a very pointed look. 

“A real  _ chat _ dedy.”

“You need to stop, dude, your puns are giving you away.”

“Giving what away?”

Nino purrs a little bit and then blows another bubble as the sun slips behind the horizon. Adrien’s not that upset that Nino figured it out; Ladybug’s the one who’s really behind keeping identities secret, and… it’s not like Adrien  _ told  _ him.

(He just let like 50 or so cat puns slip out one day. Same thing).

“Do you want to stay over?” Adrien asks, but he knows Nino can’t.

“My dad promised me we’d work on the car.”

“Okay. Have fun!”

Adrien stays the night on the roof anyways.

Ladybug stops by later that night.

He’s sleeping on the roof again. His father’s away and he’s enjoying this relative amount of freedom he gets as himself and he does not expect her feet to land on the gravel and her yo-yo to snap into place and for him to wake up with a start.

“Wha- What are you doing here?”

“I’m  _ patrolling. _ Why are you sleeping on the roof?”

“I always do this.”

“No you- wait…  _ really? _ ”

“It’s nice up here,” he offers.

“Just… be careful next time. Chat Noir and I spend a lot of time running across rooftops and I’d hate to step on you.”

For a second she looks like she’s about to leave, but curiosity calls her back (and proceeds to kill the cat). She looks almost shy as she approaches, before plopping down on the blankets next to him.

“What is it you do up here?”

Adrien finds his voice, but just barely. He also makes sure his brain-to-mouth filter is functioning again. “Watch stars, mostly.”

“Really?” she asks, and she doesn’t sound skeptical, just… curious. Inquisitive. Why she’d be interested in him and his stars is beyond him but he’ll take any opportunity to spend time with her, so he starts talking.

Like Nathalie, she’s a good listener. She listens to all the stories with ease, even recognizing a few of them. He doesn’t tell her about his mother’s constellations, though. Those feel… off limits.

Maybe it’s because there’s still those identities between them. He’s still watching what he says and those constellations are such a core part of him that it doesn’t feel like the right time.

Maybe later, though…

They’re right on the story of Perseus and Andromeda (a story he’s grown to love because happy endings) when her miraculous beeps.

“I’m sorry, I- I have to go.”

She runs off. Just like Cinderella. Adrien supposes the fairytales of his childhood aren’t quite dead yet. 

 

5

Technically it was supposed to be a group project. But Nino and Alya have wandered off somewhere and Adrien really doesn’t want to go interrupt them because, to be fair, he and Marinette were doing most of this part of the project anyways.

She brought cinnamon rolls. Ever since he went to her house to practice for that tournament and offhandedly mentioned to her parents that he doesn’t get a lot of sweets at home she’s practically showered him with baked goods.

He’s really grateful to her family for letting him eat all this.

To be honest, he likes the pastries more because they remind him of when he was younger and his mother would go into the kitchen and whip something up because she was wonderful at baking but not so much at cooking.

When he told Nino he was glad Marinette’s parents asked her to bring all these treats for him, he rolled his eyes so hard Adrien thought they might fall out of his head. “You’re both too ignorant for your own good,” he’d said before stealing a cinnamon roll off the plate and lounging spread out on one of the couches, his head in Alya’s lap.

Now the two of them are gone, off somewhere, and Adrien heads up to the roof.

Marinette tilts her head to the side when he reaches the ladder but follows him up anyways and he wonders why he has no qualms about her seeing the place that means the most to him. Her and him and the night sky just feels… right.

He extends a hand to help pull her up and then they’re surrounded by a vast expanse of stars. They are figurines inside of a snow globe. Their silhouettes are the beginning of a story.

Adrien tries his best to show her around. He points his fingers at the trunk that has food and blankets (and Plagg) in it. He waves vaguely at the place where the little bits of the fence still stick out from the gravel, the same place that Ladybug had swung her yo-yo around months earlier. He nervously makes some sort of comment about Chloe throwing clothes out her window and the strangest thing happens.

Marinette laughs.

No one’s ever laughed at him as Adrien before. Always as Chat. He’s hilarious as Chat. He should be a comedian as Chat, but  _ Adrien? _

Her smile is bright and pretty rare around him and he’s glad he’s got her smiling because there was a period there that he’d thought she’d disliked him for a while. Not hated, of course, because Marinette  _ doesn’t _ hate, on principle, but her inability to talk to him compared to how easily she floated through conversations with their classmates had him convinced.

He’s not quite sure why he’s nervous, especially because now that she’s up here he can’t imagine her being anywhere else, but she has food and he has stars and he really doesn’t want to talk about what it is Alya and Nino might be doing in any various rooms.

So he does what he knows how to do when he’s up here. He leans back and looks at the sky and tells her about the stars.

Except, instead of the normal stars and constellations, he starts telling her about the ones he’d known as a child. The Candy Dragon. The Knight of Pins. Princess Cartwheel. He tells her the stories behind them all, and he expects her to laugh but she doesn’t. All she does is smile like the moon is full even though it’s a new moon and the only lights around them are the stars of the city and the stars of the sky.

“Which one were you?” Marinette asks him, when he’s finished his fifth tale. “The Knight of Pins or the Hungry Unicorn?”

She’s laid down next to him now, only a few inches away on the quilt. His hand has accidentally brushed hers a few times now and his stomach feels like it’s falling when it happens. 

He nearly chokes on his cinnamon roll.

“No, actually,” Adrien starts a bit sheepishly, “I was Sir Adrien the Lionhearted.”

Marinette’s smile grows wider. “Really?”

“Chloe was Lady Chloe the Righteous. It’s actually why I got into fencing. I used to really want to be someone’s hero.”

“Used to?”

He can’t tell her he’s Chat Noir. He can’t tell her about how he’s started to really be someone’s hero. He can’t tell her about how, for the first time since he was tiny, the stories in the stars have felt less like a fairytale and more like something he can reach… eventually.

So he settles with the truth.

“Eh. I’m not a very good hero.”

Marinette bolts up into a sitting position at that and ends up taking his face in her small, soft hands. Her eyes are really blue. He doesn’t think he’s ever noticed that before. Blue like the cloudless sky in the summertime. Blue like running through the halls with a wooden sword and crashing into the cerulean skirts of his mother. Blue like happiness.

“Hey. You are anything you want to be.”

Marinette’s very assertive. He knows that. She’s inspiring and charismatic and he’s seen her in action like this hundreds of times but it’s never been directed at  _ him _ before and he’s stuck between feeling like those lights they shine on witnesses they’re interrogating in crime dramas are shining down on him and feeling like her lips are made of magic and suddenly everything she’s said is not only truth but prophecy.

The moment breaks, however, since she pulls away quickly, face turning the color of those wrappers of that circular cheese Plagg likes.

“Hey, Marinette,” he starts, quietly, after a moment of almost awkward silence. 

She looks up at him again, the blush faded but not quite gone yet. 

“Thank you. You’re amazing”

Her blue eyes are blown wide with surprise. She shouldn’t be surprised. He means it. With every fiber of his being. She  _ is _ amazing. She’s everything and she’s here and so are the stars and, for the first time, the night sky looks a little more like a very deep dark blue than a pitch black.

“I mean it.”

When she kisses him he barely feels it because she pulls away so quickly but she smells like apples and candy and other things that are sweet but not quite as sweet as her. She won’t even look him in the eye as she stutters out apologies and all he can think is that some part of him has changed on this rooftop and this is the last gear of the machinery beginning to turn.

He cuts off her apologies with another kiss, one that he tries to pour everything into because she  _ is  _ everything. She is not a princess and he isn’t a knight but she’s just made him feel like a hero and he feels like he can tell her anything without even having to question it.

She’s just… Marinette. Beautiful and talented and the kindest heart he’s ever seen. He’s been in love with her for a little bit, he thinks, just had it covered up by the Ladybug thing.

But, try as he did, he couldn’t get the words “Candy Dragon” out around the superheroine. With Marinette it slipped out before he could even stop himself. 

There are a lot of fairytales Adrien knows, but too little of them involve the magic of a rooftop and the way it feels to kiss someone and find yourself under a snow globe of stars.

**Author's Note:**

> once again i find myself writing inexplicable amounts of words for this show. i feel the need to point out that perseus and andromeda are my favorite story from greek mythology so their presence in this is because of that. thanks for reading you all you're great for putting up with me.


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